(Find Jamie Tweeting here – comments below)

Yesterday saw an almighty fuss kicked up over the Independent’s star columnist Johann Hari, who has become embroiled in a plagiarism row. If you’ve missed the whole affair, Fleet Street Blues is a good place to start.

Hari is accused of – well, he admits – using quotes from books and other interviews to pad out his features. Now this is bad enough. There are questions over copyright – answered here by media law expert David Banks – and that enough would put a dent in Hari’s reputation as a real force in the British media.

But I don’t believe that’s the main problem with what Hari has done. The issue is that he has deliberately and willingly mislead his readership. By putting the borrowed quotes in prose, that suggests they were given to him in person, Hari has deceived his readers. He has lied. Fleet Street Fox says journalists can’t lie. I’m not convinced this is right and struggle to see how else you could define Hari’s actions.

It also raises all manner of questions about Hari’s columns. If he has invented these scenarios – weakly and shoddily defended on his blog – then what else has he made up? How is the reader supposed to believe what he writes after this?

Now, I’m not saying Hari should be fired. But he has thus far shown a chronic lack of knowledge regarding what he has actually done wrong. Indeed, he doesn’t get that he’s done anything wrong at all. In the aftermath of this affair, lots more stories about Hari’s style of journalism are sure to come to light. Here’s one… more will follow.

Simon Kelner wrote on Twitter that in ten years at the newspaper, nobody has ever complained that Hari has misrepresented them in a piece. Again, he misses the point. Kelner and Hari have both forgotten that readers – let’s not forget the Independent doesn’t have many of in the first place – are the most important thing for a newspaper.

If readers have no faith that what they are reading is true, they will go elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if the Indie’s circulation plummets any more in the coming weeks.

Interestingly, fellow left-wing columnist Polly Toynbee was among the first to leap to Hari’s defence. Hari claimed what he does is common, that he rang around other papers and confirmed with their feature writers that this is normal.

I find this hard to believe. Nobody I’ve ever met has mentioned it – and countless folk from local and regional press have said on Twitter they would be sacked if they did something similar.

The Independent quickly published this piece, another shoddy, lame excuse for a defence of Hari’s actions that blames witch hunts for the reaction from the masses. Amusingly, my comment on a Guardian article regarding the incident was plagiarised by another poster below the line. Ironic, much?

Other journos have said they tidy up quotes from interviews. Yep, that’s standard practice. But it’s totally different to what Hari has done in his columns. He’s falsified situations, painted a picture in the reader’s mind of an occurrence that never happened.

The Guardian’s Bad Science man Ben Goldacre said the reaction has been over the top. How is what Hari has done any different to the articles he picks apart in his own features?

Noam Chomsky has previously denied making comments to Hari that the writer then quoted in a piece. This is not the first time this has happened.

Hari has already missed the chance to hold his hands up and apologise to his readers. More importantly, he needs to stop misleading them and writing about things that never happened. Using the quotes from previous interviews is okay, as long as they are cited properly and not placed in a context suggesting they were given to Hari directly. How he – and the Independent – responds to the outcry is sure to be worth keeping an eye on.

Apparently, Hari will be writing about the saga in the Independent today. (Freelancer’s note: Wannabe Hacks update of front page here – we’ll Tweet and link here when it goes online!)

In the meantime, have a read of the #interviewsbyHari hashtag on Twitter. It’s hilarious!